Geographic distribution of enterprise employees, enterprise datacenters, and cloud-based resources has increased the need to transfer data among information technology (IT) system components that are deployed at such distributed locations. These components can be connected through a wide area network (WAN). Due to increasing virtualization and an increasing demand for infrastructure, high-availability systems have been burdened with transferring several bytes of data between geographically dispersed locations. Furthermore, these systems have been tasked with transferring the data as fast as possible in order to avoid business downtime and losses.
For example, large enterprises often need to rapidly migrate virtual machine (VM) snapshots among various locations in order to reduce the effective distance among users, data and the processing of the data. However, VM snapshots can be double the size of the running VM in memory. As there can already be latency involved in restarting a snapshot, the transfer time of the migration should be as short as possible. Real-time analytics will include data from different sources and at different locations. Other examples involving provisioning of high-speed systems include changes in analytics queries, which can cause changes in the topology of data sources, data caches and processors, such that a previous network configuration is no longer optimal. In the scientific community, there is a need for efficient on-demand data transfer services that can transfer experimental results (which can include hundreds of terabytes of data) from locations where the results are generated to locations where the results are analyzed. Maintaining constant high-speed connections is impractical in addressing such needs, because they can be expensive, may not scale with deployed systems, and may be controlled by network operators. Accordingly, any change or improvement in the provisioning of high-speed systems could depend on slow and cost-inefficient interactions (e.g., an interaction to modify the quality of service (QoS) guarantees stated in a service level agreement (SLA)). Thus, there is a need for more flexibility in the approach and cost modeling of provisioning high-speed data transfers.